The nine-year-old children who came into work with their father at the JFK Tower seem to have captured the public imagination. I've been asked my opinion on this subject at least 25 times. A lot of why people are excited seems to stem from a misunderstanding of how the air traffic control (ATC) system works.

I flew from Boston to San Antonio, Texas yesterday on American Airlines. I dutifully segregated my liquids (sunscreen and toothpaste) into a quart-sized Ziploc bag and put it in the front pocket of my carry-on. Then I forgot to take it out when going through the Logan Airport security line at 5:00 am. The 25 TSA employees present at the checkpoint failed to notice this infraction (liquids remaining in bag). It occurred to me that this has happened many times before.

Doris Haddock, a New Hampshire political activist known as "Granny D," died Tuesday at age 100. A decade ago she walked 3,200 miles across the country in 14 months to draw attention to campaign finance reform. Here's what she had to say last month about the Citizens United Supreme Court decision.

Just as I discussed the decreasing revenue of Atlantic City Casinos in our previous blog posts, today I came up with more news about casinos losing their revenue share. Why are casinos from a few states showing declines in their revenues?

Starting a diet can be difficult. First is finding the motivation to take that first step toward eating healthy. Barring a good friend or spouse who is dieting with you and helping you find that inner strength, most of us are on our own when it comes to jumping that hurdle. But there are lots of weight loss drugs out there that claim to help you control those annoying hunger feelings.

The March issue of Wired magazine has an interesting article about a relatively new method of generating high-quality images from relatively low-quality samples. The technique, known as compressed sensing or compressed sampling, is in some sense an inversion of the more familiar process of data compression.

I wonder if we're barking up the wrong tree (or down the wrong hole) when we obsess about "curation" of news " a favorite topic of mainstream media preservationists. Maybe what we need is to see explainers as advocates of our curiosity about the deep questions, or deep facts, such that they might become unavoidable in news coverage.

Five, ten years from now, all the rest of the independent ISPs and WISPs will be gone. So will backbone players other than carriers and Google. We'll be gaga about our ability to watch pay-per-view on our fourth-generation iPads with 3-d glasses. And we won't miss the countless new and improved businesses that never happened because they were essentially outlawed by regulators and their captors.

When the next Darfur, Rwanda, or Bosnia takes place, the fate of civilians won't depend on armies in green or warlords seeing red. It will rest with the men in grey suits who gather on 1st Avenue in New York. In the backrooms of the United Nations, diplomats from the great powers will gather, wring their hands, and ask themselves: what should the international community do when a state massacres its own citizens?

At 60 years old, Gil Scott-Heron has a new album out, his first in 16 years. I'm New Here was released by independent label XL Recordings in early February. Work began on the album in 2007 after Scott-Heron's release from prison on drug charges.

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